Today marks the first working day back in Korea after the whirlwind trip that was Techcrunch50 (TC50). How was it you ask? Simply put it was an incredible learning experience both for the company and for myself personally.

First, background. We didn’t have a chance to present on stage. But we did own the TC50 DemoPit. And we were close… real close to getting chosen to present on stage. Close enough in fact that the big daddy Arrington himself came to speak with us, but in the end we were beat out by SocialWok, an interesting Google mashup application (see we are gracious losers).

That is all water under the bridge though. The important thing here is what we learned at TC50 as a company.

1. Prepare for Murphy’s Law – You have heard of Murphy’s Law. It is the saying that goes, “If something can go wrong it will.” And at a high profile, high energy (read high stress) event like Techcrunch50, you can bet that Murphy’s Law will come into play. Maybe it will be the WiFi, or maybe it will be something else. So be prepared for it. Don’t let it destroy your demeanor and ruin your experience. A flawless demo / pitch is great, but if something goes wrong you have to roll with it. Laugh it off and everything will be fine. Whoever you are talking to will leave with a good taste in their mouth. But make a big deal out of it and believe me… beyond just having a bad demo you will have just turned that person off completely to your product.
2. Have a 30 second teaser and a 5 minute version of your pitch, but more importantly LISTEN – The teaser often goes by another name, the elevator pitch… but regardless of what you call it, you need to have one. When you first approach people, many of them will tell you they are in a hurry, so you need the teaser to get those people interested enough to stick around for the longer demo.
   
   
   The five minute pitch on the other hand is your baby. That is your chance to knock’em dead. And if you didn’t have a solid pitch before the conference, you can bet that by the time you leave you will know your sh*t inside and out. To be honest this may very well be the most valuable thing that you get out of this conference. Here you have the opportunity to pitch your idea to people who aren’t your friends and who aren’t your family. You will receive unfiltered feedback from people who know what they are talking about. LISTEN to this feedback. It is golden. If they aren’t impressed with what you are doing, find out why. If they are impressed, don’t let it get to your head… rather find out what they don’t like and what they would like to see implemented in your product.
3. Bring Swag – This point ties in very closely with the one above. Believe it or not, most of the people there are not there to talk with you, so be ready to woo them in with some sweet swag. And by swag, I mean something cool. Something that people will continue to want to have and use after the conference. Fliers, pamphlets, and things of that nature are a waste of trees and resources. They just end up in the trash.
   
   What we ended up doing was making some really kick-ass T-shirts (pictured above) designed by punodostres and using those to lure people to our booth. Worked like a charm.
4. Work the crowd – In general people will not come to you unprompted, you need to go get them. Everyone there is browsing for something interesting. But despite that fact, people are surprisingly reluctant to initiate the conversation. That is your job. Something as simple as “Hi, do you have 30 seconds?” will do. Once you and your team have grabbed the attention of a few people, the process is self-perpetuating. More people will linger around your booth if it looks like something interesting is happening there, making your job a hell of a lot easier.We kept our booth manned with two or three people at all times, which is something I would definitely recommend. One person may be able to generate sustained interest throughout the day, but it’ll be a whole lot easier with two or three.
5. Everyone at your booth should be doing something – This one is common sense. Don’t have someone just standing around twiddling their thumbs. You don’t have enough space around the booth to be wasting it like that. If you aren’t engaged in a conversation or demonstrating your product, you need to be walking around introducing yourself, and sending people back to the booth.
6. Be prepared to be exhausted – Hours of sustained talking by itself is hard work. But if your experience is going to be anything like ours was, you will be making last minute tweaks to your product that will keep you up until the wee hours of the morning. So my advice is this. Get pumped. Like National-Championship-Gameday pumped. This is your time to shine. And sustain that initial adrenaline rush for as long as possible. Only after that initial rush has started to fade. would I recommend caffeinating yourself.Another thing to keep in mind is that the tokens you need to earn for the last presentation spot on stage are collected at 2pm-ish. For us, it was full steam ahead, afterburners lit up, until then. We were so busy trying to talk to people that every one of us skipped lunch. But once the tokens were collected, things relaxed significantly.
7. Have a unique business card – To be honest, I fought this one tooth-and-nail. But I lost. And I am glad I did. Our CEO decided that something unique was the way to go, and so we had a TC50 special edition business card created. It was basically a little flier. The cover was our company name, and if you opened it up you would see my contact info and a picture of a iPhone like device. A lot of people commented on the design, saying they liked it. Now maybe they were just being polite, but whether or not they really liked it, we had a memorable design and that is the point I think.
8. Be friendly – I can’t stress this one enough. Yes, so maybe it is true that on the day you are in the DemoPit, you are competing against everyone else in the DemoPit for those tokens. But a little competition is no excuse to be rude. Be nice to your neighbor. Some of them don’t even care about the tokens, and they will end up sending people your way if they like you. And remember this event should really be about getting feedback and building your network and being nice helps immensely, so keep focused on what is important.
9. Have marketing / press release material prepared – I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Hey, but you said no paper swag earlier.” And you’re right I did. And I meant it. What I mean by having marketing / press release material prepared is have something saved to your computer and all zipped up and ready to send off at a moment notice. There are a number of bloggers looking to cover a product just like yours, and if a Techcrunch blogger walks up to you and asks for you to send over a summary of what you are doing, be ready. You can’t ask for better publicity than that, so when it happens you want to be prepared.
10. Was TC50 a better choice than DEMO? – This final point is a really more of a question that I have been wrestling with myself. And the honest answer is I don’t really know. In regards to the price difference alone, TC50 is definitely a better deal (free vs. 30k). But in terms of the weight of the event DEMO may be better.I was actually having this conversation with a friend of mine (@tomserres) whose company (Piryx) will be presenting at DEMO in two days time. And he made a great point in that DEMO has been around for 20+ years and the event takes place on a resort outside the city, so everyone there is basically stuck with everyone else for three whole days. You eat together, you drink together, and you sleep together. While at TC50 the people that you really want to meet don’t usually even hang around for the whole day. They show up, do their thing, and leave. Is the increased opportunity to brush shoulders with the movers-and-shakers in the industry worth 30k? I don’t know but it was a great point.

That brings my reflections on TC50 to a close. If you would like to hear more, or want to share a similar experience please feel free to contact me personally (@drebabels) or leave a comment below.

I personally found the experience itself extremely rewarding.

The energy at this conference is incredible. I can’t say I have been to a lot of conferences… to be honest I have only ever been to one other conference (the Virtual Worlds Conference back in 2007). But the energy at TC50 was off the hook. This place was teeming with entrepreneurs and soon-to-be entrepreneurs. I would have loved to have spent more time just chatting with these guys one-to-one. Getting to know them. Having a few drinks with them. These were kindred spirits. And I ate it up… every single second of it.

I don’t know how many life long connections that I made there. At this point I would be hesitant to even say one, but a few of the connections I made might turn into strong long term relationships in the future. I have my hopes up.

Business Take

The advantages to our startup is a little less clear. Before making our decision to attend TC50, we read Expensify’s take on it. And in short they say that TC50 was well worth the effort. And after having experience TC50 I would say that the majority of their points are spot on. But for us the cost of attending was a major issue. We are based overseas in Seoul, South Korea, so for us expenses were significantly higher than it would have been for a company based in the states.

But with that said we did learn some very valuable things. The most important of which is:

Don’t go to the DemoPit with the mindset that getting that coveted last spot on the stage is the end all and be all of your time their. The stage is a perk… a really nice perk, but it shouldn’t be your sole reason for going. The most important thing that you will get out of this experience is the opportunity to really pitch your idea and get unbeatable, no-punches-pulled feedback from people who know what they’re talking about.

Anyway rather than rewriting many of the same things that Expensify already said in their post, I will quickly run through their ten points and give you my take on them as someone who just got out of the conference.

1. Host locally – Spot on. If your can run it locally, then do it. For us an internet connection was absolutely necessary to demonstrate what our product could do, but I can tell you… more than once we had issues with the internet that made our demo run less smoothly than it otherwise should have.
2. Defend your turf – Can’t relate to this one.
3. Get a solid 3-5 minute pitch. We demoed about 100 times (we maintained a counter). Our pitch was good at the start, but it was absolutely rock solid at the end: there’s a very limited set of questions — by the end you learn them all and will have found the perfect answer to each. In fact, I’d say the #1 benefit to TC50 has nothing to do with press, investors, or anything. It’s the opportunity to practice your pitch in front of real people, again and again. This will pay off a thousandfold when you’re out raising money – This point is golden so I left it all here.
4. Work it – Too true. You gotta hustle. No doubt about it.
5. Get a good business card that doesn’t look like a business – I didn’t believe it until I got there, but now I am a firm believer. Make your card look unique. On a last minute whim, our CEO changed the design of our card so that it folded open to reveal a phone. Everyone complimented the design, and even if they were lying… you can bet they will remember. And that is the important thing.
6. Stay “on” at all times. – Agreed. And I would like to add be prepared. Have your business cards on you and if you have some swag… carry it around with you.
7. Skip the swag. – This is one of the few points that I actually disagree with. To be fair, Expensify was talking about fliers mostly, and on that point I agree. Fliers are a waste. But we brought T-shirts. And those were a hit. Keep in mind the crowd that you are trying to appeal to. These are startup people. They are young. And they work in T-shirts and jeans. Our T-shirts were a hit and if you can afford it I would recommend bringing some. When people wear your shirt, they are endorsing your product… and you can’t get advertising much better than that.
8. 2 people at the booth, no more. Kind of agree. We were running 3 at our booth and for us it worked out great. But more than that would look a little like over kill.
9. Keep going to the very end. Toward the end of the day, just plant yourself at the big-stage exits and keep pitching for that almighty demopit chip. Many people  might have seen you and liked you but never gotten around to deciding. Furthermore, some really great conversations start with “Why should I give you my chip?” – This is part of hustling. You just have to do it.
10. Follow up when it’s over. When done with the conference you’ll have a huge stack of the cards and no idea what to do with them. I’d suggest sending them to Shoeboxed to have them all scanned (even better – buy yourself a NeatCo business card scanner), add them to your mailing list, and then send a “Nice meeting you at TC50, I’ve added you to our mailing list” email. - I don’t know if I am going to be buying a NeatCo scanner, but following up is already something that I have started doing.

If you have 15 minutes or so to spare from your day, the video is well worth the time. Dan Pink is an engaging speaker and the information he presents  uproots the long accepted belief that motivation using cash incentives works.  It doesn’t.

To summarize: The ideas on motivation that held true during the process oriented do-as-you-are-told methodology of the industrial era, no longer holds true in an age where mechanical processes (manufacturing, inventory management, etc) are being delegated to machines, and creativity and outside-the-box thinking drive the economy. Believe it or not, using money as the primary tool for motivation is counter-productive when you are trying to encourage creativity.

When linear thinking is necessary, money still works. But when you need to think laterally, productivity drops as the monetary reward goes up, i.e. we get less creative so it takes longer to solve the problem.

The solution to  encouraging creative thinking and increasing productivity is not money, it is the freedom to act. The best way to encourage creativity is to stop treating employees like a dog you can train and start acknowledging that they are independent agents capable of much more than you give them credit for. As employees, it is important for us to believe that what we do or what we are trying to do has some sort of intrinsic value.

Now Dan Pink was speaking from a business perspective, but this idea got me thinking. What about education, both from a student’s perspective and a teacher’s perspective?

From a student’s perspective, grades would look a lot like monetary incentives. The higher you score on this test, the more you participate in class, or the more homework you complete… the higher a reward (grade) you get. We are trapping our children in the same do-as-your-told processes that has dominated business for so long. And in doing so we do them a grave disservice.

Those standardized tests that we as a world have put so much emphasis on as the way to measure our ‘ability’ are a perfect example of what is wrong with our education system. Those tests claim to measure intelligence, but all they really measure is how well you can take a test. Walk into any Princeton, Kaplan, or any other test prep center and they teach you the same thing. They teach you how to recognize patterns and types of questions. In essence they teach you how to game the system. And to compound the problem, these test prep course cost a lot of money, so in most cases it is only the wealthy that can take full advantage of this service.

So now what of the teachers? A few weeks ago, Obama suggested implementing a pay-for-performance plan for teachers, where seniority and tenure are de-emphasized as the means for determining pay and merit is elevated. One of the problems with this, as I wrote in my last post, is that merit is a difficult quality to categorize and measure. And if we set our standards for merit wrong, we could easily do more harm than good.

In that post, I didn’t explain what I meant by that, because, to be honest, I didn’t really know how. To me it just seemed intuitive. But listening to Dan Park brought me back to that problem. And now I think I can explain what I meant.

If we measure merit based on how well a student performs in our current system of education, then we are only going to end up magnifying the problems that exist in the system. More focus on grades and standardized tests will result in more subject oriented and do-as-you-are-told teaching. We get more of the same when what we need is a change.

To make a pay-for-performance plan work, we need to first change the system so that we de-emphasize grades and test scores and grant teachers more freedom on how to teach, so that teachers can focus on instilling in our children that which is really important: a life long love for learning.

There is no easy solution to this problem, but the acknowledging and acting on the ideas that Dan Pink presents and others like him argue are the first steps toward solving this problem.

What is interesting about this article is that it seems to supports what Obama is proposing to do about teacher pay… perhaps not directly but some of the authors complaints would be addressed by the proposed de-emphasis on tenure and seniority, and a stronger emphasis on merit. The question that this raises of course is “How do you effectively measure merit?” And of course the consequences could be tragic if the answer to that question is not carefully thought out. But that is a conversation for another time and place. First we must identify the problem, and the argument below is a compelling one. Enjoy.

It’s easy to blame inner-city kids for the problems with inner-city schools. They come from dysfunctional homes, people tell themselves, have careless parents and bad attitudes. They are doomed from the start. But the children I see starting kindergarten at my school in the South Bronx are just as bright and inquisitive as the ones at the elite private school a few blocks away. The problem isn’t the kids. The system is the problem.

Understaffed, disorganized, and chaotic, most inner-city schools are obstacle courses only the most resilient student can overcome.

I offer this viewpoint as a newly “excessed” teacher, which means that due to budget cuts and an antiquated seniority system, I have essentially been let go by my school. In my three years of teaching, I have helped non-readers in September to become chapter book-readers in May, and only three of my 72 students have ever failed either the state math or language arts exams. I am the kind of teacher who gives up her lunch period to provide extra help to students, stays late to talk to parents, and walks into the school each morning with a smile. Next year, I will be replaced by a “veteran teacher” who has been pushing papers for the past four years, is outwardly upset about being “forced back into the classroom,” and has a reputation for skirting responsibility (i.e., failing to tutor students who she has been assigned to tutor).

…

Who loses there? Well, good teachers are out of a job. But far more important, the students become lame ducks, stuck in a school with teachers who don’t want to be there and in a system that doesn’t think they’re worth as much as the ones up the block.

…

The problem is systemic. The problem is fixable. And our kids deserve a solution.

Check out The Stimulist for the full article

Clay Burrell at the Change.org blog pointed the relevant passage  out first, which I have placed below. (Bolding courtesy of Clay Burrell)

Asia is pouring money into higher education. But Asian universities will not become the world’s leading centers of learning and research anytime soon. None of the world’s top 10 universities is located in Asia, and only the University of Tokyo ranks among the world’s top 20. In the last 30 years, only eight Asians, seven of them Japanese, have won a Nobel Prize in the sciences. The region’s hierarchical culture, centralized bureaucracy, weak private universities, and emphasis on rote learning and test-taking will continue to hobble its efforts to clone the United States’ finest research institutions.

Even Asia’s much-touted numerical advantage is less than it seems. China supposedly graduates 600,000 engineering majors each year, India another 350,000. The United States trails with only 70,000 engineering graduates annually. Although these numbers suggest an Asian edge in generating brainpower, they are thoroughly misleading. Half of China’s engineering graduates and two thirds of India’s have associate degrees. Once quality is factored in, Asia’s lead disappears altogether. A much-cited 2005 McKinsey Global Institute study reports that human resource managers in multinational companies consider only 10 percent of Chinese engineers and 25 percent of Indian engineers as even “employable,” compared with 81 percent of American engineers.

Some would argue that it isn’t true. Natural Resources like fossil fuels are scarce. Fresh water is scarce. Arable land is scarce. That is all true.

But consider the world that we are moving in to. Fossil Fuels are energy for the last century. For this century Solar, Wind, and Hydrogen will be our source of energy. Fresh water will present a larger problem but one that we will be able to overcome. Genius minds inventing serious technology are already moving to make that a reality. The problem of a burgeoning population being supported by less and less arable land is a serious issue. But the solution to that lies in the creation of sustainable cities (cities where urban gardens are grown on rooftops) and increasingly effective genetic engineering.

Writing this remind me of a quote by William Gibson

“The future is already here. It just not evenly distributed.”

We are living in an age of abundance. If you are reading this post then you have already experience what I am talking about. Think about the steps that you took to get here. Perhaps you googled something. Which generated a list of a million and one pages of information for you to browse through. And you clicked on a link which just happened to be the link to this article. When you are finished here you will google something else. Or you will follow one of the links that I have placed here in my blog. Or you will spend the next few hours reading Free.

The best part… it is all free.

Information entered an age of abundance with the birth of the internet. But only recently have we begun to see the truly powerful effects that this has and will continue to have on society. It is utterly transformative and we are only at the beginning, but already monoliths of the past in the Music, Film, and Publishing industries have begun to tetter because of it.

As the future becomes more evenly distributed we will continue to see profound changes  in the way our society functions.

I don’t know about you… but I am excited.

FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson